2/19/2005

Spell Check

Although setup in an area of Damascus crowded with offices of sworn translators, the government-owned Real Estate Bank did not bother to hire somebody to check the spelling on this elegant signboard announcing its new ATM "serves".

9 comments:

Firas
said...

You know, this issue is so embaressing with our government. I can think of a dozen of other examples where as you put it "they didn't bother to hire somebody to check the spelling"... The streets and direction signs were always full of mistakes ... for God's sake, they can simply use the Microsoft Word spell check function without even needing to hire anybody! I'm sure there are even people from the public who would volunteer to help, don't you think?Frustration!

You know I really echo the last person's comments. I hate this habit we have in Syria of not spelling the most simple words correctly. If you are not going to do something right-just don't do it! We look worse for incorrect spelling of english than if we just used arabic. Until we learn to use "spell check" let's just drop the foreign languages!...still love Damascus though :)

In the case of "ATM Serves", spell check wouldn't catch the error. "Serves" is, after all a word (present tense form of 'to serve')No, for many such spelling errors you must have a human being checking.

As a native speaker of English, I sympathize. Such errors are extremely common, and you even see them committed in the USA by native speakers. (but that's another story - declining literacy)

I don't know why they keep doing these mistakes. It's not only signs like that. In Dec when I got my passport reissued, they spelled my name in English completely wrong even though it was written ifront of them. I don't get how a D can look like a B to them. They should know it's not a B because the name in arabic was right there as well. It made me wonder do these people hire other people that know well enough English not to make these mistakes or at least know to proof read things before they're out?